Westgate Mennonite Collegiate is a Christian school grounded in the Anabaptist tradition. Located in Winnipeg's West Broadway neighborhood, the historically Mennonite student body now includes other Christian denominations, as well as other religious and nonreligious individuals as well.
I was hired to continue where Westgate's previous contracted designer left off, creating yearly program guidebooks, promotional posters, internal use graphics, and fundraising and campaign visuals. Staff were aware that Westgate's brand and graphics had grown disparate, uncoordinated, date, and overdue for a complete overhaul. The best way to describe the past three years of doing design work for Westgate would be a slow evolution from being just the next freelancer to playing a role in leading the Westgate brand through an iterative evolution.
Here are a few examples of Westgate design materials created prior to my involvement.
Prior to 2018, Westgate's graphic design was handled by single freelancer and an array of print shops with existing relationships with Westgate. The only points of consistency were a logo for which proper files did not exist, "warm dark blue," and the frequent use of Frutiger and Garamond in print contexts. The website, meanwhile, utilized typefaces all the way from Arial to Roboto to Abel to PT Sans. There was no branding guide, and only limited access to previous years' documents as most native files and even built PDFs were with the previous designer.
As I see it, the brands of many Mennonite institutions across Manitoba and Canada are in trouble to varying degrees. The disappearance or radical downsizing of communications departments means more responsibility for fewer staff--frequently non-communications staff. The brands they are expected to keep up rely on legacy typefaces too expensive to use in web contexts, and their guidelines are too comprehensive and not suited to digital contexts or for use by small numbers of non-designers. In If the context was commercial, the resulting dilution of visual standards and aesthetics and lack of concern or budget to make corrections would have an effect that one could easily link to declining sales, but in the non profit scenario, where revenue is connected to donor relations, the role of good branding is apparent and yet also difficult to talk about.
Westgate has never had dedicated communications staff and is already living a reality where multiple internal departments share responsibility for its brand with freelancers and external communications contractors. For this reason, I judged it to be prudent to immediately begin the process of shifting Westgate's brand to something newer and nimbler, where brand assets are easily available and branding principles explained in simple terms in materials easily accessed by internal staff.
Westgate is tightly bound to consistent annual communication cycles with parents and donors, outsourcing design in these seasons to contractors. Understandably, there is little priority or even precedent for discussions around brand. Coming in as a freelancer and observing the brand crisis, it became clear to me that changes to the brand would sooner come as patches, shifting things graphic by graphic, into something new over the course of a few years across the calendar year cycles. Because of the existing disarray of Westgate's branded materials, experimentation would do very harm to. I pitched this approach to my clients at Westgate, Krista Neustaedter Barg and Alexis Dirks, and they agreed that I could experiment with changes while working through the calendar cycle of materials.
Frutiger and Garamond for years have informally been Westgate's principal typefaces, joining Mennonite institutions like Mennonite Church Canada, Mennonite Church Manitoba, and Mennonite Church USA (Canadian Mennonite University uses "Myriad," but the impression is the same to the lay person). Westgate's student body and by virtue its parents, go well beyond the Mennonite world, and mainting that strong visual link isn't essential, especially when that aesthetic is somewhat dated and broken for other institutions.
Program Guidebook
I suggested in mid 2018 that we try a fresh new start with new principal type, and the the first major brand change came in late 2018 with Franklin Gothic FS and Fanwood Text being used in the layout for the 2019-2020 program guidebook, along with a handful of other materials that year.
Fundraising Banquet
Along the way came the Fundraising Banquet, another opportunity to test out the use of Franklin Gothic, this time with a bit of custom typographic illustration. This comprised a core graphic with a satellite of many materials, all of which make use of Franklin Gothic.
In addition to starting off on new typographic footing, my clients at Westgate regularly commmunicated how happy they were with "Let Inspiration Shine," the Inspiring Spaces Capital Campaign, a large-scale campaign produced for Westgate in 2017 by Winnipeg's Bounce Design agency. Link again here.
Hitherto, my work had been mostly to keep producing Westgate's annual materials while experimenting with a new typeface.
Playing off of the campaign's strong secondary light orange colour and a stronger push towards minimalism, the 2k1k Capital Campaign visuals I developed for a 2019 donation effort very much came from the campaign's playbook and served as the first comprehensive exploration of a new look and feel for Westgate's graphics moving forward, which in retrospect I consider Westgate 2.0
Pivoting to Libre Franklin
Over time, Franklin Gothic FS created problems. Even though Franklin Gothic FS was freely available, staff were starting to use whatever copy of Franklin Gothic was installed on their computers, causing a crisis of standardization. Additionally, Franklin Gothic FS revealed itself to not have enough natural warmth out of the box, and spontaneous use of the font by non-designers wasn't suited to Westgate's vibe.
For both reasons, we switched in late 2019 to the slightly different Libre Franklin and Source Serif. As a slightly wider and softer take on the traditional harder-nosed Franklin Gothic, Libre Franklin projects intelligence and sophistication in a more relaxed and playful cadence, making it in the end an even more ideal candidate for a small private school like Westgate. Libre Franklin and Source Serif can easily be installed with hassle-free licensing. Additionally, both fonts are free for any future web redesign, and both fonts are actually pre-loaded in a number of online design platforms like Canva, Google Docs, and Google Slides. Both fonts can also be hosted and distributed by third parties, meaning sharing the fonts with staff through internal computer systems is possible.
To ensure continuity, Libre Franklin was tested on 2k1k materials and found to fit nicely, maintaining continuity with the new 2k1k aesthetic but opening up more possibilities both to myself and to Westgate staff's communications work.
The use of Libre Franklin for Westgate materials was further clarified and explored in the 2021-2022 Program Guidebook in 2020, another excellent opportunity to explore a longform document and establish some additional visual precedents. You can view the guidebook in full here.
In addition to the program guidebook, very few other materials have been produced in Westgate 3.0, as the onset of COVID in early 2020 ended nearly all in-person activities at Westgate and cold-started hybrid learning, reducing the need for promotional materials and squeezing budgets.
Following COVID and the lockdowns of 2010, Westgate decided to release its 2021-2022 guidebook as a digital PDF. The new format takes a smaller size to account for its use in desktop, tablet, and even mobile viewing by the end user, and utilizes links and buttons to aid in navigation and the easy queuing of video content from Westgate teachers discussing various parts of Westgate's academic programming.
Both the digital and print editions are constructed on the same layout bed, with print-specific and digital specific content, layout features, and interactivity kept in separate layers. Creating one or the other is as simple as hiding or showing those layers when building a PDF. You can see it in full here.
Shortly after the creation of the first Westgate 3.0 materials, I created basic branding sheet for internal use at Westgate and built out a basic directory of fonts and brand assets, which included building a fresh, canonical logo (there were 3 or 4 various copies circulating amongst Westgate staff). This is the first branding guide, branded colours, and even standardized logo file that Westgate has ever had, period.
The hybrid 2021 guidebook, with its new interactivity precedents, served as inspiration for Westgate's new website (under development by Ryan Santschi from Interplay media -- I am not involved), which, as of November 2021, is in Beta.
Shortly after the creation of the first Westgate 3.0 materials, I created basic branding sheet for internal use at Westgate and built out a basic directory of fonts and brand assets, which included building a fresh, canonical logo (there were 3 or 4 various copies circulating amongst Westgate staff). This is the first branding guide, branded colours, and even standardized logo file that Westgate has ever had, period.
In the wake of the COVID lockdown, there have not been many opportunities to work on larger scale print and layout projects, meaning that the guidebook is currently the most complex and primary brand piece of Westgate 3.0, and there have not been many opportunities to develop it to the degree Westgate 2.0. This does not have me worried, but perhaps disappointed, because working on Westgate's brand is a singular honour.
The hybrid 2021 guidebook, with its new interactivity precedents, served as inspiration for Westgate's new website (under development by Ryan Santschi from Interplay media -- I am not involved), which, as of November 2021, is in Beta.
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